How Infrastructures Age: Engineering, Nature, and Environmental Justice in the Lower Mississippi Delta

Abstract

This dissertation is about living in a world of aging infrastructure with a focus on impacts to environmental and community health rather than technological function. In this study I bring together the history of technology and environmental history to show how places and infrastructures age alongside each other in the Lower Mississippi Delta, and how communities, engineers, and policy makers engaged in debates related to infrastructures across their lifetimes. In four chapters I examine four technological infrastructures that sit along the lower Mississippi River: the Mississippi River and Tributaries Project the Army Corps began constructing after the flood of 1927; a closed down TVA power plant in Memphis, Tennessee; an as-yet uncompleted flood mitigation project in Mississippi’s Yazoo Delta floodplain; and the web of petroleum canals, pipelines, and refineries of Louisiana’s Terrebonne basin. By taking the principles of environmental justice as a foundational starting point for understanding community-defined goals for good infrastructures and healthy environments, my work demonstrates how the harmful effects of these technologies impact communities unevenly—with Native, Black, immigrant, and low-income communities bearing the burdens of pollution and environmental harm. My work builds on the tradition of environmental justice scholarship produced by and for people of the US South by articulating how Southeastern Native epistemologies disrupt the ongoing harms of settler colonialism and racial capitalism and offer alternative, more just futures.